Ping spikes

[mrgoldfish1]

In gaming ping is king so I can’t understand how it’s not a priority for BT. I understand how Netflix has a big demand but why the two can’t be accommodated is beyond me. With the testing I’ve done it seems Netflix has priority over most things so is that not throttling a connection to accommodate another. I’ve got a 80/20 connection and I find it ridiculous that I get ping spikes because a Netflix stream takes priority.

[cowo8]

@mrgoldfish1 

yep it's completely ridiculous, i've heard good things about zen, would be paying far less for a better service so i'm going to be contacting them soon. i'm going to give executive resolutions a bit more time just in case they actually do something helpful and manage to fix it lmao

[Reckless11]

Checking my connection this morning, it was nice to see a consistent 12-15 ping with 0 spikes.
The only thing I have noticed that has changed is that the 81.139.56.100 and 81.139.57.100 Dns servers provided by BT were now being routed to London, at least for me. Before, these same servers were routing me through Norwich on the East coast, despite living in the Midlands, and the difference is quite something with regards to both my consistent ping time and my input delay.
Not 100% sure if there is a link here, but it seems logical to me that this is contributing towards my connection being flawless right now.

[john9411]

I commented before about the increase in streaming and the impact that this might have on latency; not only for BT but all ISPs. An article on BBC website is now saying that the introduction of 'cloud gaming' (Google introducing it this month) could eventually kill off the games console and we would all be gaming via streaming. Hopefully ISPs are taking note and acting accordingly to address the problem but do not hold your breath!

[h3x1e]

Cloud gaming will never take off, well maybe in 30 years. 

[dubstepzombie]

As I've said it's easily possible ping spikes can be coming from other sources, if interested google for 'intel puma defects', the defects affect various cable modems so unlikely to be related to FTTC but I believe Virgin media had problems relating to this chipset.

Quote "Intel’s Puma 6 chipset included in several cable modems is defective as it allows high spikes in network latency quite often (slow web page loading, for example). These severe network latency spikes interfere with online gaming, streaming video, or simply surfing the web. Network jitter (variable latency) also causes problems."

Still interesting though how it's easy to assume a ping issue can't be your internal hardware or router...

[george1976]

You got to be joking right?

99% of the people here say it's directly connected to streaming.

If it was for those defects you are mentioning that would be constant no?

Most of the cases here are solved by BT staff, that renders your explanation null don't you think?

[mrgoldfish1]

You’re right definitely is related to streaming it shows on the graph on pingplotter. I’ve been in contact with BT, they’ve asked me to send them my pingplotter graph’s so there expert’s can look into it. I’d be happy for them just to acknowledge there’s a problem, that’s the first hurdle.

[dubstepzombie]

@george1976 

You took my post in the wrong way, I was just pointing out that a company as large as Intel can screw up on a massive scale and if you was a Virgin media customer you could easily be suffering from latency and ping problems due to a screw up by Intel which probably wouldn't be the first place to look.

As you've said this doesn't apply to this case and it's been proven not to be internal hardware like the BT home hub but I still say in general to everyone and new comers to this thread  it's better to be sure it's not your setup, it's easy to reach the wrong conclusion.

So for example if you was testing from a Windows PC and it was doing a background update using 80% of your bandwidth, you start streaming and that then consumes 100% of your bandwidth, I reckon that would give you ping spikes as Netflix buffers up data. Although I suspect 99% of users on this thread have tried everything they can think of to solve the problem to no avail - seeing as 'the problem' is definitely something external to your home and beyond your control.

So going back to what I was saying the problem could easily be for example some common hardware component in the road side cabinet or exchange or BT routing  that isn't behaving as expected like the Intel Puma defects. With similar massive hardware screw ups like Meltdown and Spectre the hardware fault could be anything that causes the ping issues i.e. it doesn't have to be there all the time. I'd suspect the routing and packet handling in general is all hardware offloaded with plenty of FPGAs and custom ASICSs for speed, so that's all it'll take is for some  hardware fault to be present and you're more or less stuffed until the hardware is swapped. Yes you could probably bodge around the problem like Intel did with firmware updates but it'll never be 'right' until the hardware is fixed.

To quote another example of Puma "More than 18 months after the design blunder was first brought to light, Intel is still working to iron out the creases in its Puma high-speed broadband modem chipsets."  and  this is Intel, not some little startup with no resources, it's taken 18 months and still it wasn't fixed.

Of course I'm just guessing and theorizing but that's all we have without BT officially confirming what the problem is and a general fix roll out.

[MarkG33]

I haven't read any recent pages so apologies in advance but here is my experience. 

When the mod helped me at the end of October it was simple;

I've been testing it for a long while. 

I was told a profile change was done to my line and to wait 24 hours then reboot my router to see if it worked. 

Well in my case this 'fix' worked wonders for me, I can have Spotify, Netflix, Twitch and the like running without any apparent spikes/teleporting. If there is any it's tiny and undetectable. 

Maybe I was on one of those 'affected curcuits'. 

So something is indeed getting changed on their side to fix this problem. Whatever it is I do hope they end up rolling out a nationwide fix.

Good luck to everyone one who is still suffering this as it is infuriating to saythe least.